Want to learn Korean? Good call! Korean is hot property.
Interest in the language has soared over the past few years.
“Gangnam Style” by Korean pop icon Psy was the first YouTube video to reach one billion views
(and the first to hit two billion views).
K-Dramas – Korean television dramas – are a rising trend that’s set to take the world by storm.
Why the Korean Alphabet is Easy to Learn
The first step in learning the Korean language is becoming familiar with the Korean alphabet,
as it’s likely considerably different from the other languages you’re familiar with.
When first seeing the Korean alphabet, many people assume that it is just a bunch of squiggles
and that it is as impenetrable as learning the thousands of Chinese characters that students of Mandarin face.
Believe it or not, this causes some learners to give up before they even start!
In Korean:
‘ㅅ‘ sounds like ‘s’;
‘ㅏ’ sounds like ‘a’;
‘ㄴ’ sounds like ‘n’.
When put together they look like ‘산’ , which is pronounced as ‘san’.
Rather than being just three letters in a line, it makes a nice self-contained block!
Pronouns are rarely used in Korean, so you can often just say the verb.
The other person can guess from context who you are referring to.
As a result, here is a verb conjugation list for the verb 먹다 (to eat) in the present tense:
I eat – 먹어요
you eat – 먹어요
he eats- 먹어요
she eats – 먹어요
they eat – 먹어요
we eat – 먹어요 (in case you didn’t notice, they are all the same).
Equally, Koreans rarely expect foreigners to speak Korean perfectly
so they won’t judge you as harshly as people from some other countries if you mispronounce a word.
Learn the basics with some help, and then get out there and experiment with all the doors that you’ve opened
by beginning the Korean learning process!